


threaded

by viscrael



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Canon Gay Character, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, uhhh theyre in love and married!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-21
Updated: 2018-07-21
Packaged: 2019-06-13 21:52:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15374124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viscrael/pseuds/viscrael
Summary: “Do you want to talk about it?” Takashi asks quietly. It’s dark, overbearingly so, but he doesn’t need to see to envision the way Adam’s eyelashes flutter over his dark cheeks, the way his face looks with one cheek squished against the pillow. He’s seen it enough times. Engrained it in his mind, pressed it into his memory so he could never forget. When he left for Kerberos, even when they had broken it off and he wasn’t sure what he would return home to, he’d thought about Adam’s face like this, lying down beside him, his skin smooth and his eyes dark and his lips turned up in a small, endearing smile. He’d thought about it every day, every time he could afford, repeating this image so he wouldn’t forget.That was his fear, then: that he would forget.





	threaded

**Author's Note:**

> ADASHI ALREADY OWNS MY ASS!

When Takashi wakes, Adam is sitting up on the bed, back to him.

It’s just barely morning, if one could call it that yet. Light hasn’t even risen over the horizon, the sky outside their apartment dark through the beige curtains. The room itself is dark except for the red glow of their alarm clock on the bedside table, blinking a time back at Takashi. _5:05 A.M._

“Adam,” he says, half a question, half its own answer as he sits up in bed, the blankets pooling around him as he does. In the dark, he sees Adam turn to him. He’s in pajamas—flannel pants and no shirt—one foot on the carpet, the other still in bed.

“Hey.” Adam leans over and plants a soft kiss on Takashi’s cheek. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

Takashi shakes his head. “You didn’t. Why are you up?”

Adam looks like he’s going to turn away from Takashi, maybe avoid eye contact or get up to leave. There’s something off about him this morning. Other than just the fact that he’s up far earlier than any person should be unless absolutely necessary, his whole demeanor is…stiff. He usually kisses Takashi’s forehead. This fact doesn’t get past him.

But—Adam doesn’t move away. He pulls his other leg up onto the bed, the one that had been on the floor as if he were readying himself to get up, and lays back down. Takashi mirrors him until they’re both laying down with their heads on the pillows, pulling the covers over both their bodies. It’s warm in the apartment and warmer outside, enough so that being under so many blankets should be uncomfortable at best and oppressive at worst, but Takashi doesn’t mind the heat so much as long as they have their legs tangled together under the sheets, Adam’s foot coming up to rub against his bare calf comfortingly, the weight of the blankets somehow making him feel—safe. Or maybe that’s Adam’s presence doing that.

“Bad dream,” Adam answers quietly, their faces close enough together that Takashi can feel Adam’s breath on him, ghosting across his cheeks. He has morning breath, but Takashi doesn’t point that out. He’s probably in the same boat.

Under the blankets, Takashi moves his leg over Adam’s, so the two are fully, officially tangled. “What about?”

“The usual.”

Which—it’s…maybe unusual, that there _is_ a usual for them. But most of their story is unusual. Space, alien abduction, cloning, years without seeing each other, the whole _galactic war_. Nothing about them is normal.

Things on Earth haven’t really been _normal_ , either, these days.

The war is over, or as over as it can be. It has been for a year now. Adam and Takashi moved in together the moment they could feasibly do so, getting married six months afterward. They would have had the ceremony the moment they were able to, but after all they had been through, Takashi felt like…he should give Adam something more special than a small gathering and a ring. Anything would have been good for them, had they not been able to put on a wedding, and they had almost gone right ahead with it the moment they were sure Takashi wasn’t going to die—but then Takashi had thought…didn’t they deserve something soft? Something elegant, something grand?

The wedding, when they finally had it, was more than proof of their love for each other. It was the biggest “fuck you” that anyone could have given to the universe that had tried to kill Takashi Shirogane countless times in his thirty years. It was more satisfying than just surviving the hell he’d been through; it was living, it was thriving. It was allowing them to be _happy_. To have everything they could have wanted.

But even if they survived, it wasn’t without a fair share of pain. Takashi couldn’t count how much war and violence and blood and death and near-death he had seen, but Adam could.

Somehow it was Adam, who’d experienced less, that was still stuck with things like these. Bad dreams like these.

Funny how the human brain works, how it can adapt to long-term trauma and yet so easily reject the one-time. Not that Takashi didn’t have his own deal of PTSD to deal with—he’d been dealing with it for years by the time they made it back to Earth, and he would continue dealing with it for probably his whole life. Shit like that you didn’t heal from just because you were reunited with the love of your life or because the suffering was finally over. He understood Adam, his symptoms. The fear. The waking up in the middle of the night, the anxiety, the distrust.

The flashbacks.

When Voltron came back to Earth the first time, the time before the war was completely over, they didn’t leave it unscathed. Galra forces had pursued the lions, and too many people were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Adam…

Well. He has bad dreams now.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Takashi asks quietly. It’s dark, overbearingly so, but he doesn’t need to see to envision the way Adam’s eyelashes flutter over his dark cheeks, the way his face looks with one cheek squished against the pillow. He’s seen it enough times. Engrained it in his mind, pressed it into his memory so he could never forget. When he left for Kerberos, even when they had broken it off and he wasn’t sure what he would return home to, he’d thought about Adam’s face like this, lying down beside him, his skin smooth and his eyes dark and his lips turned up in a small, endearing smile. He’d thought about it every day, every time he could afford, repeating this image so he wouldn’t forget.

That was his fear, then: that he would forget.

It only intensified when he was captured, when the days stretched to weeks to months to a year, when he thought he might never get another chance to see Adam. His biggest fear was forgetting. He pressed that image to his memory, along with any he could grasp: Adam laughing, his eyes squinting with the weight of his smile and his laugh that shook his whole body; Adam quirking an eyebrow, amused by something Takashi said but unwilling to completely dismantle it, his dark brown eyes pleased behind his glasses; Adam playing with Keith, either a video game or a puzzle or something else completely mundane, some moment suspended in time of the two most important people in Takashi’s life finding comfort in each other, however small it was before Keith truly warmed up to Takashi’s boyfriend. Adam, Adam, Adam.

Adam.

“Only if you think it would help anything,” he says. His hand finds Takashi’s under the covers, gentle, like he’s afraid of startling Takashi. “…Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Think it would help?”

Takashi threads their fingers together. “I don’t know. Do _you_?”

“I don’t know,” Adam repeats, laughing. “That’s why I asked.”

“It helps me,” Takashi admits. He thinks about the conversations he used to have with Allura, out in space, when she was the only one who could _relate,_ really, to the trauma. That was when they were first beginning their time as Voltron, when no one else had truly been affected yet by the jarring change. At the time, only Allura, reeling with the fresh death of her entire race, could relate. They would talk, out on the observation deck when everyone else was asleep or they at least thought they were.

_I miss them,_ she’d say, and Takashi would let her talk. And when she’d prompt, if he could handle it, he’d talk too.

_I wish I could forget what they did_ , he’d said at one point. At another, he’d said, _I want to go home. I want this to be a dream._ And the image of his then-ex-boyfriend flashed through his mind. He wanted to go home.

Back then, when there was so much downtime and so little normalcy, talking about his own bad dreams with someone else had helped him. A lot. It still does, sometimes. He tells Adam as much.

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Takashi says. “But it helps me, at least. I find that it hurts me more in the long run to keep it in, especially when it’s really bothering me.”

Adam seems to think about this. He squeezes Takashi’s hand, their fingers laced tight enough to never let go. For some reason Adam has always had bigger hands than Takashi, but it’s not as obvious when they’re like this. Threaded.

Takashi thinks about that, the word. Threaded. Connected, inseparable. He can’t see it in the dark, but he knows his wedding band is there on his finger. The two of them never take their rings off before getting into bed.

“I think I just want to stay here a while,” Adam says, sounding sheepish, apologetic, like he’s ashamed for not choosing to talk about it. “I just want to be with you.”

Takashi leans forward. Presses his forehead to Adam’s gently, enough to be tender.

“We can do that,” he says. “I can do that.”

_I’m here. I’m with you_. They meet somewhere in the middle for a kiss without ever needing to speak, as gentle as the forehead touch, as grounding as their hand still threaded, as intimate as their legs still tangled under the heavy sheets.

Takashi falls into sleep just as sunlight begins to peak through the window.

**Author's Note:**

> come scream abt them with me on [tumblr](http://viscrael.tumblr.com)


End file.
